


Holy Water

by Lilly_White



Series: Aeris/Sephiroth Fics [1]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Bloodthirsty!Aeris, F/M, Vigilante AU, aeris and sephiroth collaborating, but it might go pretty far, cetra headcanons, i don't know how far i'll take this, in terms of their collab i mean
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 22:38:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15543681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilly_White/pseuds/Lilly_White
Summary: Aeris snaps long before Sephiroth does. She's been picking off the scum of Midgar one by one, moving up the chain, using her sweet little flower girl looks as a facade. Even took down a Turk or two on the way. After the Nibelheim crisis, she joins up with Sephiroth, and they take Shinra down, piece by bloody piece.





	Holy Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ardwynna Morrigu (Ardwynna)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ardwynna/gifts).



> (this was written on a shitty broken keyboard during work breaks while away from home, so forgive the quality. next week i will clean things up and add the next two chapters. <3 also took some liberties with your prompt in order to make things work as well as possible so hope that's alright)
> 
> title is taken from the song 'holy water', by laurel.

****

She wasn’t the kind of girl that they should’ve lost sight of.

Tseng has been on her case ever since her escape. It’s been over a decade now. There’s still a spot dedicated to her on the wall, like some mockery of an altar. One large pinboard with the corners blackened by age, holes spilling cork pieces from too many pins. Multi-coloured threads arch over a haphazard collection of blurry photos, newspaper clippings, snipped laboratory bracelets.

He knows she hasn’t escaped the slums. That’s the only thing that he’s absolutely certain of. The rest… well. She would be in her twenties now, he knows that much. But she’s still that little girl in his mind, the one with the sharp green eyes, who never spoke a word to men in suits. The one they had separated from her mother when she could barely even speak.

Seconds before she’d slipped out that door and disappeared, she had looked over her shoulder at him. He’d been holding a gun, cocked straight at her head. There was a theatre in his mind where that scene played on repeat, accessible at any time of day or night. He would analyse the events leading up to that moment, all the things he could’ve done differently, and endlessly torture himself over the question. Would he have shot that child? Even as she looked at him straight in the eyes?

He’d been a young Turk, barely in his twenties when she had escaped. Now he’s nursing a fondness for alcohol and budding streams of white hair at his temples. But she’s still with him. The eternal wild child, glaring over her shoulder at her aging captor with all the vitality of a hunted animal. Even now, in between vastly different cases about money embezzlement and perjury, he looks up at the newspaper clippings with his whisky in hand and lingers on the possibilities.

His eyes jump from one newspaper clipping to the next. The leads he’s been following these past few years have only consolidated his knowledge that she’s still out there, circling ShinRa with the slow feline patience of someone savouring their vengeance.  Over the past five years, it’s been the aging lab assistants, dying off a little too neatly one after the other. The deaths were spaced out enough to not form a stack in the obituaries, but they were still noticeable. The last of the victims – because they had to be victims, Tseng is sure of that – the last had been in a retirement home. He’d been in charge of the unit that had overseen Elmyra’s incarceration and later palliative care.

And this year… she’s had her fill of white coats, and seems to be angling those green eyes higher.

It’s the bureaucrats, now. Already they lost two of them while they were busy being over-protective of Hojo and Hollander, who they’d guessed would be the next logical targets. Two stout supporters of ShinRa senior, shareholders since the early days and deeply invested in the company, dead in freakish accidents.

Tseng gets up, sips his whisky as he stares at the article he pinned under the lab bracelets. The one explaining the ancient Cetran ability to “send people off”. All the papers he’s read about it are hypothetical of course, all academic queries basing themselves on archeological findings and archives. But to him at least, there was nothing hypothetical about what happened during those murders.

Most of the papers in existence were written by Gast, so he had borne that particular sting as well as he could as he read up on Cetran ritual sacrifice. The Cetran nomads used to send off groups of either animals, monsters or human beings in order to replenish certain barren areas on the planet. Mostly, they did this to rejuvenate places where the Lifestream was buried too deep under the crust, or spread too thinly, to bring life to the surface.

All of Aeris’s victims had been sent off. Every single one of them. There had never been any bodies at the places of death. Just faint ectoplasmic glitter, tracing the places she had knelt, the places she had consecrated with bloody vengeance.

Shinra senior thought Tseng was obsessed, and didn’t believe half of it. But he still allowed Tseng certain liberties with security measures, perhaps out of some superstitious belief that even if the girl was long dead, the emerald ghosts that lingered in every nook and cranny of their city hadn’t taken kindly to how they’d treated the last of the Cetra.

Tseng doesn’t even care about the health and safety of any of ShinRa’s plump, pampered bureaucrats – he only wants to catch her once and for all. He has to be quicker this time before she switches target groups again. Only by spreading the information to the very best of ShinRa’s units will he be able to have eyes everywhere.

He sits at his desk, opens his e-mails, and types a few relevant addresses into the bar. Allows himself to stir the dredges of hope in the pit of his stomach. There’s enough evidence to sway everyone, now, surely. This year, he won’t fail. 

-

If the Turks are calling for help, then it’s got to be serious.

Sephiroth can’t quite get his head around it, though. First of all, it’s almost inconceivable that a highly wanted individual might’ve survived in _Midgar_ for more than a decade, without ShinRa collecting even so much as a picture of them.

Secondly… he remembers her. Hojo had, for some reason, facilitated communication between the two of them back in the labs when he was a kid. It was a long time ago, but… he remembers that girl, though it’s in bits and pieces. The reddened hands pressed up against glass. The bare feet swinging under the bench while they pumped something into her arm.

‘ _I see you around here a lot,’_ she had said one time. ‘ _Do you live here too_? _’_

He’d looked at that pale white face and said, ‘ _of course not. Nobody lives here.’_

She had stared back at him, unblinking. _‘I do.’_

He’d asked Hojo and the assistants about it. Why there was a little girl living in the labs. Nobody would give him a straight answer, of course. All of them would simply assure him that she was just as well taken care of as he was. Then, abruptly, he stopped seeing her around. He was used to Hojo’s specimens having high turnover rates, but this time it was a human being, a child like him, who had simply disappeared.

‘ _Don’t worry about it,’_ Hojo told him. ‘ _You’d be better off just putting her out of your mind.’_

All this time. She was alive. After receiving Tseng’s e-mail, he mulls it over in his mind as he mechanically goes through his evening routine; dinner, shower, sitting on the edge of the bed to braid his hair while staring unseeingly at the wall ahead. Somehow, back then, he must’ve convinced himself that she had died in the labs, or perhaps been released only to die a little later like the rest of the slum orphans who weren’t institutionalized. And then he’d completely put her out of his mind. There had been a war on – he’d come across a lot of little girls that needed saving, that he was in no position to extend a hand to. In the business of corporate warfare, one learned to forget these things. One compartmentalized and moved on.

 _This is a skilled assassin we’re talking about,_ Tseng’s e-mail had read. _She has a personal vendetta against ShinRa. What you must keep in mind is that she always makes sure to keep the element of surprise. When I give you security assignments, it’s not necessarily the bigger fish she’ll go for. I need eyes everywhere, on everyone, at all times._

A personal vendetta against ShinRa. Sephiroth smiles mirthlessly, looking over at his bedside table. There’s a leatherbound photo album there, gathering dust. He hasn’t opened it in a long time. It’s useless to look at pages and pages’ worth of those same two faces, when they are etched in the backs of his eyelids. 

She wouldn’t be the only one to act on that kind of vendetta. And seeing the wealth of lab personnel she’s allegedly taken care of… Sephiroth can’t help but feel curious, rather than the cold detachment he usually feels for all arrest-on-sight targets. Some of those names in Tseng’s e-mail… they were names from his childhood. He had known those people only through their latex-clad hands and identical masked faces, but they had delved deep into him, dragging him down to the worst imaginable places and observing how he writhed.

He’s glad that they’re gone. That she might’ve dragged them down to similar places before giving them the mercy of death.

He goes to bed that night with the acute awareness of her presence in his city, somewhere out there in the rain-slick streets. When he falls asleep, he dreams of wide panes of glass enclosing white fog.   He places his hands against the glass, and sees a pair of reddened palms approaching his on the other side. They flatten against the inch-thick barrier, a vicarious contact in a world of mist.

-

The flower arrangements are always spectacular at ShinRa’s corporate do’s.

As part of the new security regimen, at least one first class is expected to attend any social gathering that involves vital members of the ShinRa board. It’s far below Sephiroth’s pay grade to stand in at a ball, but what with the current state of affairs, he’d much rather be here than helping to track down the last of the Genesis clones.

That’s all he can think of as he diligently surveilles the lit-up spaces of ShinRa’s ballroom. He’s been hollow for a long time, now. He remembers telling Zack once, that if things escalated, he’d leave ShinRa. But he’s still here, dithering, walking across a glittering ballroom floor as he looks for a political terrorist he’s not sure he even disagrees with.

There’s red taking up his vision, a girl in a sumptuous red dress. The first thing he thinks is that Genesis would’ve fallen head over heels for that deep blood-red neckline. She’s standing next to one of the bouquets that’s spilling from the alcoves in the walls, idly tracing the edge of a lily with one finger. Sephiroth lingers for only a few seconds, and then keeps going, shaking the ghosts from his mind.

Throughout the evening, he notices that the red woman somehow keeps reappearing in his field of vision, like a drop of blood on a gold-brushed canvas. She seems to be on the arm of some young man for most of the evening, but she keeps glancing teasingly at the older gentlemen in the room, who seem to greatly enjoy the attention. When she smiles a little too often at one of the fat ShinRa shareholders in her periphery, Sephiroth decides to watch her.

Five minutes in and he realises with a jolt she has green eyes. He looks harder. She fits the age group, and there’s something about those small, delicate hands of hers… perhaps it’s nothing, perhaps he’s only projecting. But something ties him to her, like an invisible string, tugging him along so that he’s following her from one room to the next.

He’s just making sure, he tells himself.

The crowd in the room he’s just entered seems to be busy with the complicated steps of a group dance. Sephiroth quickly realises that if he doesn’t join in, he’ll lose her from his sight. He accepts the outstretched hand of a bejeweled woman, and he’s swept into the rhythm, the music sawing through his empty chest as he steps to the side, one-two forwards, one-two backwards, clap at the waist, twirl to meet the next thousand-gil dress with some human form occupying it. He brushes shoulders with other padded suits and there’s slick red hair, there’s the curvature of a slender waist and he remembers, he thinks of things he shouldn’t be thinking about, not on assignment, not anywhere remotely public. But this was the kind of place – this was the kind of dance – that ghost of his would’ve liked it, would’ve liked, would’ve loved, past tense as always, he’s getting tired of these feelings and this – _nothing_ in his arms except perfume and cold hands. He’s on duty. He shouldn’t be thinking about this. But he can’t help it and just as he’s beginning to sink, a reddened hand grasps his and it’s warm, it’s firm, it drags him back to the world of the living. 

She’s in front of him. That red dress frames the slender lines of her neck, her collarbones, her cleavage. It’s a slippery picture and his eyes have a hard time staying put. She smiles up at him and those green eyes, Gaia.

It’s her. It’s got to be.

She slides her long, naked arm along the length of his blazer sleeve. They lock gazes, arms outstretched and pressed together, side-stepping around each other. It’s like somebody cast a slow spell on the room. In the time it takes them to spin once around one another, he takes in the minutiae of her face. The wispy curls of chestnut hair tickling her cheekbones. The thick eyebrows. The long inky lashes. Rose-gold skin around the eyes. Freckles. That long thin nose leading his gaze down to a pair of plump lips.

Then she turns around, showing her back to him. It’s the next step of the dance. He places one hand lightly on her waist, taking her own hand with the other. They walk forwards together in time with the music, staring ahead at the couple in front of them. From this angle, if he looks down, he can see the fine downy curls at the base of her neck, the naked slopes of her shoulders. The slight bumps of her spine at the base.

‘Never thought I’d get to dance with ShinRa’s celebrated general,’ she says. It’s quiet, intimate. He finds that her voice ignites nothing in his mind. He has to remind himself that the last time he saw her, if this is really _her,_ she was just a child with a child’s voice. Of course it wouldn’t feel familiar.

He steps forwards, careful not to let his feet catch her flowing skirts. ‘If you were invited here, then you must be used to prestigious company,’ he mutters back.     

‘Me? Oh, not really,’ she says. ‘I just do the flower arrangements. I get the option of being paid or invited to the dance, so. I choose to dance.’

The other couples start moving, so Sephiroth echoes their movements, leading her away from him by flinging out his arm. He watches her twirl around herself as she goes, smiling up to her ears, her long loose ponytail curling after her. There’s a moment of silence as she locks eyes with him again, stepping back into his arms. She presses herself against the side of his body, curling an arm around his shoulders so she can hold on as they step into the waltz. Sephiroth wonders whether the intended target was really that fat shareholder as he holds her against him, far too close, staring down into those unfathomable green eyes.

‘I hope these dances live up to your expectations,’ he tells her. ‘If you’re willing to sacrifice a salary for them.’

‘Some sacrifices are well worth it,’ she tells him with a smile.

Then the warmth of her body disappears as she twirls to the next man, and he’s left reeling as the couples all break away, following the fragmentations of the choreography.

-

There are corridors, secluded, dark. Shinra knows that working girls come to his soirées. He specifically chooses where to host his parties so that they’ll have room for a lucrative 30 minutes of privacy. Sephiroth sees the fat shareholder idly strolling through one of the doorways that leads to these expensive, sticky nirvanas, and sure enough, five minutes later his stalker follows.

He catches the girl as she’s about to slink through the doorway, twists her wrist behind her back, pulls her against his chest. The crowds of dancers continue to spin, oblivious to them, perhaps thinking that they’re only having an intimate moment.

‘You have a materia belt around your thigh,’ he mutters into her hair. ‘And a knife in the heel of your boot.’

He feels her stiffen. ‘Men don’t usually pick up those details,’ she says. ‘Get a good long look, did you?’

C‘I didn’t have to,’ Sephiroth tells her. ‘The way you dance, I’m surprised Mr. Chaffey didn’t make the same discoveries.’

‘A girl’s got to defend herself,’ she says.   

‘A flowergirl?’ 

 ‘I wouldn’t be wearing this dress if flowers were my only business.’

‘Mmm,’ Sephiroth hums into her hair. ‘I have a couple of ideas about why you’d wear blood red on an evening like this.’

She struggles. ‘Then let me go. You know I’m in my rights to do this business.’

‘The business of sex, perhaps,’ Sephiroth says. ‘But I’m quite sure you’re here to do something else.’

He leans closer. Smells the pollen in her hair. ‘Mr. Chaffey holds 21 percent of the ShinRa company,’ he mutters. ‘For the past twenty years, he’s owned and funded the science department. He earns royalties for every lucrative discovery that he’s helped to fund. ’

He can feel her breaths beginning to shorten. Her spine bristles against him as he tightens his hold on her wrist.

‘He was there, ten years ago,’ he says. ‘He funded all of it. The state-of-the-art lab equipment. The incarceration. Every single meal platter, every single iron-wrought cage, all of it came straight out of his pocket.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘On the contrary. I think you know every single detail of that man’s professional history,’ Sephiroth says. ‘In fact, you probably know much more about him than I do.’

‘I don’t know who you think I am, sir, but – ’

‘You think I wouldn’t recognize you?’

There’s a beat of silence. She’s terrified, though she’s trying her hardest not to show it. He can tell, from the way she’s holding herself stone still.

He releases her wrist.

She turns, glances up at him.

‘What are you doing?’ she asks. There’s no sly tone in her voice now, no pretense. She’s just as bare to him now as she was, all those years ago, pale as snow in her white specimen sheath.

‘Letting you go,’ he answers.

She stares at him, distrustful, not understanding. Her eyes dart over the contours of his face, like she’s trying to decipher some cryptic message.

‘Why?’ she finally asks.

‘As you said,’ he hears himself say. ‘Some sacrifices are well worth it.’

-

He feels light, as though his feet were skimming the heights of some float spell as he lets it happen. He lets her sink into that darkness, lets her tangle her victim up in it, lets her blacken her pretty mouth as she feasts.

They find out about murder soon enough. Accuse him of being too lenient, not observant enough. Tseng leans heavily against his desk and sighs, telling him that if the girl has avoided capture all this time, it’s because she’s damn good at it. _Don’t be discouraged,_ he says. _You’ll catch her eventually. Just get her before she wipes out all of our sponsors, if you could._

Sephiroth sits in his armchair in the dim blue neon lights of the Midgarian evening. He’s got the Midgarian times in hand. He stares at the headlines, stares at that grainy photo of Mr. Chaffey’s buoyant face, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for an emotional reaction. This was a man who had watched him grow up, who had spared no expense for him to be primed and pampered. But there’s nothing, just his heart beating a steady thrum, and that stange feeling of lightness that still hasn’t left him.

-

The next time he sees her, she’s arranging flowers in the window of a rustic little flower shop on the plate. He’s been going through the painstaking process of checking every florist on the plate, so it comes as a relief when he finds her at the eighth address.

He’s dressed in civilian clothes, but there’s no mistaking the long white braid that falls down his back. She recognizes him immediately, and they look at each other through the glass for a moment. He wonders if she remembers the last time they had been in this position, years and years ago. Her, kneeling behind a pane of glass. Him, looking in.

She takes him through the sweet-smelling shop, brushing open a path in the hanging leaves and flowers, until they come to a backroom. It seems to be the storage, with open bags of loamy soil and rusty gardening equipment hung up on the walls.

Once the door is shut, she turns to him and looks hard at his face for a moment, as though trying to psyche herself up. Then she asks, ‘What do you want?’      

He looks at the wispy hairs framing her face, the expression of pained resolve. Clearly she thinks he’s expecting some form of payment for his silence.

Instead he asks, ‘Why do you send them off?’

She blinks. ‘What?’

‘After you kill them,’ he specifies. ‘Why afford them that small mercy?’

She lowers her chin, stares down at the hollow of his throat for a moment. ‘All their lives, they’ve taken and taken from the planet,’ she says quietly. ‘At least in death, they can give something back.’

‘So you speed up the process,’ Sephiroth says. ‘I suppose Lifestream energy is better off recombined than exploited by wretches.’

She looks up at him again in surprise.

‘What is it you want, Sephiroth?’ she asks again. ‘Why did you seek me out?’

‘I was told to arrest you,’ Sephiroth tells her.

Fear flickers across her face. ‘And?’ she asks tremulously after a small silence has stretched on. ‘Is that what you’re here to do?’

Sephiroth considers her. He does not, in fact, know why he sought her out. Perhaps he simply wanted to put himself in front of her, make her realise that he knew exactly who she was and yet chose to do nothing.

(Or perhaps he just wanted someone to see him.  Really see him. Drop the mask if only for five minutes in some sticky-sweet upper district flower shop.)

‘You should be more careful,’ he tells her. ‘I don’t want to have to frame someone if you fuck up your next hit.’

She frowns at him. ‘I’m not sure what you’re implying,’ she says slowly. ‘But this isn’t a two-person operation. This is my business.’

‘Yes,’ Sephiroth says. ‘And upholding appearances is mine. If you want to keep this lovely front of yours,’ he gestures at the flowers behind them, ‘then you’d best keep to your script a little better next time.’

‘I still don’t understand why you would help me,’ she says. ‘I’ve got nothing to give you.’

‘On the contrary,’ Sephiroth says. His tone lowers as he gazes at her, this fellow specimen, this child made of clear glass. ‘You have the one thing that I lack.’

She waits for him to tell her. There’s something indignant about the stiff line of her shoulders, the way she’s angling them away slightly, as if she’s expecting him to say something lewd. Then as the seconds trickle by her eyes roam over his face, confused, trying to guess his intentions.

He reaches up, allows himself to trace the line of her jaw with one fingertip. Their bodies know each other well enough already, with the way she’d been imprinted against him that night at the ball. She only lifts her chin, her eyes growing dark with the primal recognition of his touch.

‘Purpose,’ he tells her.

-


End file.
